Distortions

Antonio Gherardi
St Roseline de Villeneuve and a Bishop
interceding with the Virgin and Child for Plague Victim
ca. 1680
oil on canvas (altarpiece)
Musée Fesch, Ajaccio, Corsica

Ger Gerrits
Composition
1950
oil on canvas
Dordrechts Museum, Netherlands

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Portrait of a Woman
1850
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Geertgen tot Sint Jans
Tree of Jesse
ca. 1500
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

Giovanni Battista Gaulli (il Baciccio)
Angel appearing to Hagar and Ishmael
ca. 1690-1700
drawing
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Paul Gauguin
Flowers and Bird
ca. 1884-86
oil on vellum
Dallas Museum of Art

Ignatz Marcel Gaugengigl
Mrs James Henry Lancashire
(Sarah Hale Wright)
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Jakob Gauermann
Hunter and Serpent
ca. 1800
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Pierre Gaudard
Versailles
1979
gelatin silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Étienne-Barthélemy Garnier
Horatius slaying his sister Camilla after the Defeat of the Curiatii
ca. 1790
drawing
Art Institute of Chicago

Mauro Gandolfi after Gaetano Gandolfi
Adoration of the Shepherds
1829
drawing (print study)
British Museum

Pierre-Antoine Gallien
Portrait of writer Anatole France
ca. 1924
woodcut
Clark Art Institute,
Williamstown, Massachusetts

Thomas Gainsborough
Wooded Landscape
before 1788
drawing
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Thomas Gainsborough
Portrait of Samuel Kilderbee
ca. 1758
oil on canvas
Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney

Wanda Gág
Wash Tubs
1927
lithograph
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC

Thomas Frye
Young Man holding a Candle
1760
mezzotint and etching
Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto

Alfred J. Frueh
Eva Le Gallienne in The Swan
ca. 1923
ink on paper
National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC

from The Father of the Family

    Here I fell silent, and the good father of the family began to speak: "What you have said about wine and the days of the heroes reminds me that I have heard from certain students of Homer that he praises wine by describing it as dark and sweet.  In fact, however, these qualities are not very praiseworthy in wine, and it seems to me all the more surprising that he praises it in this way because I have observed that the wines that are brought to us from the Levant are white, like the malmsey, the Rumanian wines, and the others that I have drunk in Venice.  Moreover, the wines from the Kingdom of Naples that are called Greek – perhaps because the vines were brought from Greece – are white, or rather gold.  In fact all the wines that we have been discussing are gold; and white wines, properly speaking, come from the Rhine, from Germany and from cold countries where the sun lacks the strength to open the grapes before the harvest  – although perhaps the way in which such wines are made is the real cause of their whiteness."

    Then he ceased speaking, and I answered:  "Wines are called sweet by Homer metaphorically, just as all things pleasing to the senses or dear to the mind are called sweet.  At the same time I will not deny that Homer may have liked his wine a bit sweet.  I like it so myself, for within limits sweetness in wine is not unpleasant.  The malmseys, the Greek wines, and the Rumanian wines of which we were speaking all possess a certain sweetness that they lose with age.  The poet says, "Fill my cup with bitterer wine," not because he wants his wine to taste literally bitter – no one likes that – but because he wants an old wine that has lost its sweetness and acquired the kind of strength full of austerity that he calls here bitterness, and I should like to persuade you that Homer describes wine as sweet in the same way as Catullus describes it as bitter.  Finally, Homer calls it dark perhaps because he is thinking of some particular wine prized at that time like the wine that is called lacrima today, which is ruby in spite of the fact that it is pressed from the same grape as Greek wine."  

– Torquato Tasso (ca. 1580), translated by Dain A. Trafton and Carnes Lord (1982)